“Anaphoric Islands” Revisited

Abstract

This paper reports two experiments in which subjects made timed judgements about the acceptability of a sentence or clause containing a pronoun that followed either an explicit nominal antecedent (e.g. … dreams … them …) or an implicit antecedent suggested by the verb corresponding to the noun. In Experiment 1 the verb was identical to the nominal antecedent (dreams), and in Experiment 2 it was different (dreamed). In both experiments pronouns with implicit antecedents were judged less acceptable than those with explicit antecedents. This tendency was more pronounced in Experiment 2. Furthermore, the times to make the judgements about pronouns with implicit antecedents were longer than for those with explicit antecedents. However, the effect on judgement times was of a similar magnitude in both experiments. These results suggest that when people read about an activity such as dreaming, they do not automatically represent dreams in their mental representation of the passage, but must infer their existence from a subsequent pronominal reference to them.